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LA artist Chris Burden dies at 69
A girl plays under columns of lights in front of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, California on February 16,2014. "Urban Light," favorite place for portraits of wedding photographers, is a 2008 large-scale assemblage sculpture by Chris Burden. The installation consists of 202 restored street lamps from the 1920s and 1930s. Most of them once lit the streets of Southern California. The cast iron street lamps are of 17 styles, which vary depending on the municipality that commissioned them. They range from about 20 to 30 feet (6 to 9 meters), are painted a uniform grey and placed, forest-like, in a near grid. The lights are solar powered and switched on at dusk.
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Joe Klamar/AFP/Getty Images
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Artist Chris Burden attends the Broad Contemporary Art Museum opening at LACMA on February 9, 2008 in Los Angeles, California.
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David Livingston/Getty Images
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A boy views "Metropolis" by Chris Burden at 21st Centry Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa on October 11, 2004 in Kanazawa, Japan.
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Junko Kimura/Getty Images
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Conceptual artist Chris Burden, known in part for for the 'Urban Light' sculpture outside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has died, the museum said Sunday. He was 69.
The Los Angeles Times spoke with former L.A. Museum of Contemporary Art curator Paul Schimmel, who said the artist had died from cancer.
Paul Schimmel, a close friend of the artist and the former chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art who had organized Burden’s first retrospective exhibition in 1988, said the cause was malignant melanoma. Burden had been diagnosed with the illness 18 months ago, Schimmel said, but kept the information private except for a few family members and friends.
That piece was followed by other provocative performances — several of which are collected online — that established Burden as a counter-culture artist and innovator.
Beginning in the 1980s, Burden began working on intricate, elaborate sculptures that a 2013 New York Times article described as "things a maniacally committed hobbyist might labor over for years in his backyard workshop."
One such recent creation, Burden's installation piece "Metropolis II," is currently on display at LACMA.
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You can watch an interview with Burden below in which he talks about how he got his start as a sculptor and artist. It was conducted at his alma mater Pomona College in 2012 as part of the Getty's "Pacific Standard Time" series on Southern California art:
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